In this episode, Michael Watts talks with Desiree Fields, Assistant Professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Fields’ research explores the financial technologies, market devices, and historical and geographic contingencies that make it possible to treat housing as a financial asset, and how this process is contested at the urban scale. At the heart of her work is an interest in how economic and transformations unevenly restructure urban space and social relations, with a particular concern for how urban struggles for justice coalesce around these changes. Within this broadly defined area, she examines two transformations as they relate to housing, a crucial vector of urban inequality and terrain of grassroots political contestation. First, the shift to a finance-oriented political economy; second, the growing global reach and power of digital platforms.

Related Materials

• • Platform methods: studying platform urbanism outside the black box, D Fields, D Bissell, R Macrorie, Urban Geography, 1-7
  • Automated landlord: Digital technologies and post-crisis financial accumulation, D Fields, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 0308518X19846514
  • Constructing a new asset class: Property-led financial accumulation after the crisis, D Fields, Economic Geography 94 (2), 118-140

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